Religia Ugaritu w kontekście kultury Kanaanu i Starego Testamentu

Ugarit, the maritime city in the eastern Mediterranean, fell in ruin in the 12th century B.C., beleaguered by invaders. It left behind it a rich literary heritage which is not only testimony to the culture and religion of Ugarit itself, but also a contribution to the culture and religion of the land knows as Canaan. Deciphering its alphabetic cuneiform and reading tablets in a hitherto unknown Semitic language gave rise to renewed comparative studies within the Semitic language group. Ritual and mythological texts discovered in Ugarit helped reconstruct the pantheon of deities worshipped in that location. A new light was cast on already known religious evidence described as deriving from Canaan and originating especially in the first millennium B.C. Moreover, the mythological texts from Ugarit led to a new approach and new interpretations of some Old Testament themes. It proved especially fruitful to compare the motifs common to the Ugarit deities of El and Baal with biblical JHWH. Study of the ugaritic language largely contributed to an understanding of linguistic phenomena in the Hebrew language. Ai fresh familiarity with the literature of Ugarit and especially its poetry with its motifs became a factor permitting a new interpretation of some Biblical texts and helped understand fragments the sense of which had become lost in the intervening centuries.